The Super Yacht video scam – are you getting value?

There are producers who charge between £35k-50k per video. In the finished product neither I, nor my colleagues, can see where the money is on screen. We’re tv producers with budget management histories as long as your arm. We know what production costs. The films we viewed are the glossy imagery films for which the production ingredients, including the usual girl in a bikini, don’t cost an arm and a leg. Film costs rocket in the edit. But when the film is purely visual the only edit decision is does the shot of the jet ski go in front of the captain or after. Easy editing. Cheap. Digital marketing feeds on entertainment and detail – more hook than the girl in a bikini. But start to add interviews with the yacht designer and suddenly a film does cost money. An interview based film is an editing masterpiece. The editor is carefully placing tiny pieces of a jigsaw in a narrative-even down to swapping single words around. It’s a perfect art form – and as such obscures the difficulties it overcomes. Its skilled and costly to produce but its the only successful way to engage online.